<incom> Free-Tel: Calls for Change

[Steve Cisler]

O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony Conference is taking
place for the next few days at a hotel near the San
Francisco airport. Most are here from the commercial
side of this growing business sector. A side
conference space was set aside for Free-Tel which is a
one day event to show and discuss different ways of
using mobile phones for social change.

http://c4c.uc.org/index.php/Main_Page

The number of participants grew from less than a dozen
to 30 or so. Introductions revealed that a good
proportion are coders and other technical people who
have developed or are working on innovative
applications.  The discussion is about tools such as
Asterisk (An open source PBX and telephony toolkit)
and Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/) and
integrating all this with web applications.

David Troy of Popvox showed a volunteer call center
for making advocacy calls to voters and how the
volunteer could work from home and integrate simple
web use with a sophisticated back end to provide
messages, live conversations explaining issues and
then gather the responses and show the data in a
variety of ways: as stats, on a spreadsheet, or on a
Google map mashup.

Simon Roland, Direct Leap Technologies, Inc showed
tools used during the Canadian elections and a system
that could make about 1-1.5 millon calls per day. He
refuses to have it used for telemarketing. However, he
and his partner have done all sorts of other SMS and
mobile phone apps: a navigable database for African
ex-pats in Canada to access cultural info (oral tales
and music, etc).

Much of the discussions are informal and have
continued over lunch which is just ending. We will
have a talk by Isabela D Fernandes - Sao Paolo, Brazil
on mobile phone uses in marginalized communities.

I'll try to post a longer report in a few days at
http://place.typepad.com/digitalcommons.

Steve Cisler
Center for Science, Technology, and Society
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, California






 
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